It’s not a new phenomenon. The baddies on the right have officially registered Mephistopheles as their candidate and we know it is our obligation to fight off this great evil. No worries, the Democrats (ever the champions of neoliberal causes all around the world and vaunted friend of “the Negros” ) are here to save us with a candidate of their own: Louis Cypher. Sure, there are a few troubling things about their platform, but its nothing we can’t work out once we get them elect. The important order for the day is defeating the obvious known baddy.

We have all seen this movie. The “left” and all those with even the most tenuous ties to the Democratic party (read Blacks and other ethnic minorities, along with White lgbtq) form temporary coalitions of convenience to elect Mr. Louis Cypher. And then, with almost NO warning Louis Cypher swings hard to the right and reveals they were Lucifer all along. Now they wanna play “devil’s advocate” and extol the virtues of bipartisonship. Now they wanna do photo ops with police in riot gear and refrain from saying “Black Lives Matter” because you know… that’s divisive.

How could we have known? Why are they breaking faith with the people that trusted them? Why would they ignore the people that hoped they would be different? Perhaps because that is not how negotiations work. American politics is the art of the Quid pro Quo, or more succinctly, the “do for me.” Negotiations are only ever successful because of leverage: do this for me, and I will do this for you. If you do without condition what you have done is leveraged your own power of position on the hopes of good will. Except that Republicans are abusers, and Democrats are users. Neither party is worthy of good will. It is a fallacy to assume that because Louis Cypher only wants to defeat Mephistopheles, they want to help you. Frederick Douglass famously stated, “power concedes nothing without a struggle.”

Hillary Clinton’s campaign logo showed blue pillars with a blazing red arrow pointing to the right. Perhaps it was just a symbol, except that as a symbol now the symbolic imagery must be examined. This is perhaps the most overtly honest thing a Clinton has ever broadcast. In Hillary Clinton to be “with her” meant to have tacit support for the drone wars, for overt conflict with the most powerful nuclear state in the world: Russia. It meant continued support for a candidate that was pro death penalty, called Black men super predators and actively silenced Black women that took her to task over it.

And now here we are. We elected the first Black woman ever to be the mayor of Atlanta. Her first official act is to say we need to hire more police, who will invariably continue a predatory stance against the Blacks that elected her but Black Lives Matter? We elected a federal prosecutor who made a career out of enforcing racist federal drug mandates that ruined Black families for even the most minuscule amounts of products that many states are now legalizing. White privilege is then being allowed to be branded a “civil rights icon” for having also prosecuted ONE case against the Klan for an act of domestic terrorism that was NOT charged as such. The same federal prosecutor who then less than a week after his surprise victory only made possible by an almost impossible percentage of Black voters (93% of Black men and an astounding 98% of Black women) now feels as if he is obligated to the 8% of White Republican voters that crossed the isle to be “bipartisan” and though he was elected as an overt rejection of sexual abuse, feels as if the President should be absolved of those same excesses. Surprise! You elected Lucifer. They will not grow. There is no incentive for them and honestly some of that is on us as voters. I get why you are afraid of the offerings on the Right, but as the consensus picks become or reveal themselves to be also on that path, we must become as resolute in applying a punishment. As they go Right we must leave them Left. Primary these offenders. As that becomes less viable, abandon the parties that manipulate and use the fear of the other as opposed to appealing to your shared values. They do this because often they do NOT share your values. Find parties that do. If there are no parties that do, FORM those parties. It is easier than you think. The politics of “lesser evil” can only ever be zero sum game at best. In “The Ballot or the Bullet” Malcolm X once famously stated, “any minority that sticks together is in a strategic position.” Speaking directly about the Democrats he went on to say “you put them first and they put you last.” This has never been more true. This type of behavior can only be remedied by an electorate willing to lose short term elections in order to build new coalitions based upon the voters long term belief systems. The enemy is a complicated one but there is but one enemy. The enemy is the oppressive monotony of the duopoly. If voting is your strategy to achieve intersectional anti oppression make no mistake: there can be no victory voting for the party that has embraced the most incendiary facets of fascism or the party of Andrew Jackson.